He announced it and it arrived. Elon Musk presented today, October 28, Grokipedia, a new online encyclopedia that wants to compete with Wikipedia. The approach, however, is radically different: all the articles, in fact, are generated or edited by the artificial intelligence of xAI, which belongs to Musk. The encyclopedia seems to be part of a larger project, which had already begun with the acquisition of X, then Twitter. In fact, Musk is very clear that who controls access to knowledge it can shape opinions, guide decisions and consolidate its influence. It can decide what is “true,” which sources are reliable, or what data is shared. In extremism he decides who can know and what can they know.
And in fact, Musk described Grokipedia as a tool capable of “purify information from propaganda” which, according to him, infests Wikipedia. Or, perhaps to spread his propaganda without problems. We have already seen it on X, a social network that often reflects his political opinions. The billionaire reinstated far-right creators and used the platform as a megaphone to promote cuts to the White House spending budget. Now Grokipedia presents itself as a new challenge in the digital information landscape, intertwining technology, politics and the growing influence of AI on shared knowledge.
How Grokipedia, Musk’s new AI-based encyclopedia, works
The name is the portmanteau of Wikipedia and Grok, the conversational bot created by Elon Musk. The project, in fact, is based precisely on xAI, the same one that powers Grok. Musk’s encyclopedia aims to be a “freer” competitor to Wikipedia. As soon as you enter Grokipedia, a minimal interface appears, with a simple logo and a search bar to query the database.
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At the moment I’m beyond that 800,000 AI-generated entriescompared to the nearly eight million articles written by humans on Wikipedia. Among the first pages present there is the one dedicated to Muskwhich describes the SpaceX founder as an “innovative visionary and irreverent provocateur.” There is no shortage of detail about his diet, with references to “occasional snacks such as morning donuts and several daily Diet Cokes.” Beyond the pompous announcements, grokipedia.comhad a turbulent launch: just minutes after going online suffered a crash.
Musk’s challenge to Wikipedia: politics, AI and the control of information
The battle between Musk and Wikipedia It’s been going on for years. Already in 2020 had declared: “History is written by the winners… except on Wikipedia”. The main accusation made against the online encyclopedia is that of being a portal that professes to be neutral in public but which in fact takes sides. Several times, Elon Musk wrote on X: “Wikipedia is controlled by far-left activists. People should stop donating.”
In addition to the war against “political correctness”, there is also the attempt to reshape the world of digital information, replacing the community approach with that of artificial intelligence. On this, Jimmy Walesco-founder of Wikipedia, is skeptical. AI, according to Wales, cannot replace the precision of human control.
Wikipedia, for example, has an internal working group dedicated to promoting neutral points of view and developing guidelines for academic research on potential biases present. An AI cannot do this. As he explained Selena DeckelmannCTO of the Wikimedia Foundation at New York Times: “People tend to take the information provided by these tools as truthful, which may or may not be correct.”
